On Mon, Oct 31, 2005 at 11:42:15AM -0500, Timothy A. Holmes wrote: > I think the point is that if Linux is to make a bigger dent in the > Windows desktop, more things have to "just work". In a similar > experiment to the one which started this thread, I slowly converted > a non-technical family with three computers from windows to Linux > and recorded the issues which came up. > (http://www.swlink.net/~styma/LinuxForTheMasses.shtml) Nice work. I believe a lot of the associations could be solved quite easily. Has Mozilla decided to look at /etc/mime.types (and/or users' own .mime.types files)? IIRC there was a time when it did not, but I thought that was supposed to be fixed. If so (or even if not), you're right, the distribution could easily provide better defaults for that stuff, a frustration I had for a long time... I decided to get around it by ignoring the whole issue, as I rarely have a real need to view most media types. Usually I just ignore them. It works, but it's far from an ideal solution. ;-) To be honest, I dislike acrobat. I only use it when I absolutely must view a PDF file, and gpdf won't do it, which to date has never happened that I can recall. I used to have a hard time with xpdf opening PDFs made with recent versions of adobe acrobat, but that was quite a while ago. Have you tried gpdf? It should come pre-installed, and I think the interface is much nicer than Acrobat for Linux. How did you install Java? I'd agree that the symlinks should be created for you by the installer... you shouldn't have to do that manually. Also some of the plugins' installers want to install in version-specific plugins directories, when it would be MUCH easier for the machine's maintainer (specifically avoiding using the term "sysadmin" here) if they would install them in the version-generic plugins directory (e.g. /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins instead of /usr/local/mozilla-x.x.x/plugins). Then when you upgrade your browser, you don't need to reinstall/copy/link/etc. the plugins all over again. Very annoying, and so easy to fix. This was a nice read, and I agree with a lot of your conclusions. -- Derek D. Martin http://www.pizzashack.org/ GPG Key ID: 0x81CFE75D
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